The Visual Effects Society honored James Cameron with their Lifetime Achievement Award, along with plenty of wins for Avatar. Cameron came back to the press room for another chance to celebrate his achievements. Reelz Channel will air the awards show Friday, March 5 at 10 p.m.
Q: This must be a beautiful trophy to add to your collection.
James Cameron: Well, it’s actually genius because the first full length feature was a science fiction film with visual effects, in 1902 or 3. A lot of heritage there.
Q: Will Avatar surpass Titanic’s Oscar record like it did the box office record?
James Cameron: Well, first of all, we didn’t get as many nominations so I think that’s probably not going to happen. In fact, it technically can’t happen but I think that’s really not the point. I think different artists and different films have their season. I think that while this has been a great season for Avatar financially, I think critically it’s probably going to lean more towards The Hurt Locker at the Academy Awards. That’s fine. That’s cool too. I can’t lose unless it leads to one of the other films. In that case I’ll probably be a little bit more disappointed but as long as it’s either Hurt Locker or Avatar then I’ll be happy.
Q: Does tonight’s victory for Avatar bode well for Oscar night?
James Cameron: Well, look, I think it’s not controversial that Avatar is a very strong contender for visual effects. I think it gets a little shakier in some of the other areas like editing and so on. I think Best Pictures, we’ve got a lot of good contenders there and almost anything can happen. The vibe to me doesn’t feel the same as ’98 when we swept with Titanic.
Q: You wouldn’t really let someone else direct Avatar 2, would you?
James Cameron: A second Avatar film is something I would look forward to doing primarily because of the team that we have in place and how great they are. There are some, hopefully minor, hurdles that need to be gotten over from a deal standpoint.
Q: Have you met with Mark Webb for Spider-Man yet?
James Cameron: I haven’t been contacted about that at all. I’m happy to. I think that got blown out of proportion. I think I said I’d be happy to. Maybe he said, “I want to talk to Jim Cameron” but it hasn’t happened yet. I’m friends with Michael and Amy Pascal at Sony so I’m going to call them and say, “You guys need anything from me?”
Q: Do you have a specific piece of advice you’d give him for that project?
James Cameron: Yeah, pretty much the same for any director. Don’t f*** it up.
Q: You promised to change cinema, and here we are. Do you feel like Avatar succeeded in bringing magic back to cinema?
James Cameron: I think that it’s bringing people back to the cinema by whatever means, by immersing them in a world which probably has a magical feel to them or almost a dreamlike feeling to the audience. I’m happy with that. I’m happy with the fact that people are making a strong distinction between the small screen experience and the cinema experience. Here’s the thing that people aren’t talking about much. Avatar is the most pirated movie in history, so people have the opportunity. They can see it any time they want, some download or some bootleg, but that’s not the same as the cinema experience. I think the 3D is a part of that and I think just the feeling of immersion whether you’re in a 3D or a 2D experience, the feeling of immersion that you get in a cinema is different than what you’re going to get at home.
Q: Did Avatar in fact begin a new era in cinema making?
James Cameron: No, I don't think it began a new era. Every film builds on the stuff that went before and over the last 15 years, visual effects and 3D and all these things have really come to a peak. It all kinda came to a peak right at Avatar. We set ourselves the task of doing a sort of quantum leap to photoreal principal character which hadn’t really been done before. Photoreal principal characters so that we could intercut it with photographic stuff with live action. That was a really, really tough challenge. That’s what took us four years to make the movie.
Q: Could Avatar ever be shown on broadcast television?
James Cameron: That’s a good question. I can’t answer that at all although we’re very involved with a lot of people who have broadcast projects because I’m also a partner in the camera development. So I’m very excited about broadcast because even if the film industry grows more toward conversion which I don’t recommend, but if they do it still doesn’t solve your live situation which is sports and other kind of entertainment. It doesn’t solve your network one hour scripted because that’s on a two or three week cycle. You don’t have time to do conversions so you’re going to have to shoot it. So we’re standing by, ready, willing and able with the cameras.
Q: Is learning the old techniques like matte paintings and opticals still valuable to new artists?
James Cameron: That’s an interesting question. I think it’s valuable to know where we’ve come from, just like it was valuable for me to know who Linwood Dunn was who created the optical printer and what a huge contribution he made to a generation of visual effects artists before me. But, it is sobering to think that all the things that I enjoyed so much when I started visual effects, glass paintings, foreground miniatures and stop motion animation, all those things are pretty much obsolete now, I mean really obsolete. I think people should learn them because they should have an appreciation of the craft. In terms of actually practicing, you have to know that what you are doing is part of a niche. It’s really unnecessary, it’s so easy to do it digitally with the exception of stop motion animation which has been kept alive by people who continue to be very creative in it. If you look at Coraline and Fantastic Mr. Fox, this is not going away. People are keeping it alive and I was skeptical about that. I was skeptical that it would have value and you know what? I think both of those films are amazing and would not have looked like that if they had been done in CG. So I think it’s definitely important to keep this stuff alive and be aware of it.
Q: What lesson would you want to teach a young visual effects student?
James Cameron: Here’s what I find with visual effects artists and it doesn’t matter how young they are. It’s something that happens. They tend to get stove piped focusing on a shot technically. What they need to do is they need to look at the entire sequence and the entire film and they need to think, “What is this shot, this sequence that I‘m working on, doing for the story? What’s it saying? What’s the shot saying? It’s not just there for its own sake. It’s there to tell part of the story, to be the string. I’m constantly trying to encourage visual effects artists working individually at work stations as part of a big team to think like a storyteller. Try to think like THE storyteller in the sense that I had to sit and write the script at some point, but eventually it all has to get interpreted by what they’re doing. I found that by asking them to do that and empowering them to do that, it made a big change on Avatar because they started to think about what the shot could be instead of what they thought it should be. That’s a really fundamental thing. People can internalize that and act on that in a way that doesn’t create chaos obviously. Visual effects facilities need to run in some kind of organized matter but to use common sense, think like a storyteller, think like a filmmaker. That’s why they were attracted to this stuff in the first place.
Q: How important is the art reel?
James Cameron: Super important, right. The first two years on the project was divided between two separate streams of activity. One was the design which was done obviously with a big art department. The other was the R&D for the performance capture stuff. But, after the end of that two year design period, we had all these amazing paintings and renderings. So I put it all together into an art reel, what we called the art reel. It’s about 11 minutes long with music and with voiceover stuff. I even brought in voice artists. We hadn’t even cast the movie yet. I brought in voice artists and had them do dialogue and so on and did a lot of dissolves. It really gave you the feeling of the movie, the colors of the movie, a sense of having been to Pandora. Even though none of it was moving because it was all obviously static renderings, but it really kept you focused on what we were trying to create.
Q: Is this a watershed year with all the 3-D movies in the Oscar Race?
James Cameron: Absolutely, the two best picture nominees that are 3D films, for some reason nobody’s talking about that but it’s a huge moment for the acceptance of 3D. It’s not just relegated to a genre ghetto which it has been historically. Originally it was relegated to cheap horror films. Then in the last few years there have been some very fine animated films in 3D but now we’re beyond that to talking about it as something that could be just equitably best picture. I think that’s profound. I think it really is a watershed moment. Whether Up wins or whether Avatar wins or whether either wins, it doesn’t matter because we’re in that group for the first time. By the way, it’s also a watershed year for science fiction. We’ve got two science fiction films up for best picture category. That’s never happened before. Of course, they’ve enlarged the number. The big hurdle is winning best picture with a science fiction film. I wouldn’t bet strongly on Avatar. It would be a real milestone if it did win because Star Wars was nominated but Lost to a small film. E.T. even though it was a small film, was nominated and didn’t win either. So no science fiction picture has ever won best picture. There are milestones that need to be and this year we sort of have milestone against milestone. We’ve got Kathryn [Bigelow], a female director, up against a science fiction film in the same category. Actually, it’s two different categories. Maybe Oscar will share the love.
